Inspector O 02 - Hidden Moon (9 page)

“I’ll just keep the mask with me in case I have to come back.”

“Welcome anytime, Inspector, anytime at all.” She sat down at her desk. “You know the way out.”

“Where’s that wallet full of money?” Min dropped the normal “where have you been” when I walked in the next morning. I could tell he was angry. There was nothing on his face, and barely anything different in his voice, but he rarely went straight to the point.

“It’s safe and sound, don’t worry.” Trouble this early in the day wasn’t good. We should have gotten rid of the bank robbery case by now, but it was still hanging around my neck.

“I want it on my desk, immediately.”

“Can’t, I don’t have it on me. It’s at home.”

“In your apartment house, the one with no locks on the doors?”

“What’s the problem? No one goes into anyone else’s apartment. We have a code of honor.”

“A code of honor, in an apartment house filled with people who don’t have a pot to pee in? Why do you insist on living in that place? We could get you into somewhere nice, nicer than that, anyway.”

“It’s home, I like it.” Where I lived was my business. Min knew better than to tangle with me on that.

“Fine, that’s your affair, though it keeps triggering questions in the quarterly reviews. Somebody in the Ministry has started voicing suspicions that it isn’t normal for you to refuse multiple offers for a better place with more room. They think it must be a ruse.”

“Pardon me, but bullshit. What am I going to do with more room? Anyway, they’re good people in those apartments, no pretensions.”

“I know you are fond of the idea of the perfectibility of mankind, Inspector, but not at the expense of the Ministry’s procedures, please. How do you even hold on to such a notion? Every day we have examples right in front of our eyes telling us it isn’t true.”

“I don’t believe such a thing. I never said I did.”

“You don’t believe in the perfectibility of man?”

“Careful.”

“We’re not talking about me, Inspector, we’re talking about you. What I believe, I keep to myself.”

“So do I.”

“Ah, how I wish that were so. Do you know how much trouble I have every month, juggling the figures so it doesn’t come out that we are the office with the lowest arrest rate in the city?”

“We happen to work in a refined part of town, is all.”

“So, now you are suggesting that crime has a socioeconomic dimension, and that poorer people are more prone to crime than those who are better off?”

I laughed. “Rich people just commit different sorts of crimes. I see it every day at the markets.”

Min shook his head. “That’s not what we are discussing at the moment. We are dealing with something more philosophical than the price of shoes. We are discussing your view of mankind. Tell me, do you believe that man is already perfect? That there is no need for, shall we say, the gentle guidance of our leaders, who know, shall we say, the truth?”

Min’s mastery of the ironic was suddenly a little thin. “This conversation is going to get one of us in trouble,” I said.

“No, it won’t. I’m certainly not going to remember it five minutes from now. But you have my interest piqued. As long as we are on the subject, why
are
our arrest figures so low?”

“People make mistakes; they are not always crimes.”

“That isn’t for us to judge.”

“Not in a formal sense, no. But you’ll admit there is a difference.”

“I admit nothing, Inspector. You haven’t answered me. Do you believe man is already perfect?”

“What difference does it make what I think about mankind?”

“You are squirming like a fish on a hook. You have a guilty look in your eye. I’ve caught you, haven’t I? You basically think people are
good, that they might commit bad acts, mistakes as you put it, but if we were to tote everything up, take the sum total of their lives, on balance mankind is more good than bad. How could I have landed the only policeman on the continent, maybe even on the planet, who believes such a fantasy?”

Neither of us said anything. I looked out at the gingko trees. Min examined his nails.

Finally, he cleared his throat. “You realize, Inspector, by extension, if you believe humans are perfect, you are saying the same about yourself. That’s what the lady with the grating voice will conclude, before she pronounces sentence on us, and trust me, it will be both of us. I’m your supervisor; if your thoughts have gone astray, they’ll say it was because I didn’t give you proper oversight.”

“I haven’t said anything, Min. You’ve been doing all the talking, and all the inferring, and all the surmising.”

“How did we get into this, anyway?”

“You said I shouldn’t trust the people in my apartment house.”

“For now, for the sake of argument, we’ll grant the perfectibility of the people in your humble dwelling, Inspector. But there are other people, many other people wandering around, from all sorts of places.”

“Chagang.”

“Yes, Chagang.”

“Maybe even worse.”

“Leave the Chinese out of this. My only point is, you don’t know who might be padding down the dark halls of your apartment house at this moment.”

“Well, I think I might. More to the point, I know who isn’t, and anyone who doesn’t belong there isn’t. Maybe the doors of your building are open for one and all. At my building, there is an old woman who guards the entrance. She has nothing better to do than stop people she doesn’t recognize, and if she says they can’t pass, they don’t.”

“What about Yang? Could he get into your building, with a Ministry ID?”

“I doubt it.”

“Well, he did.”

A warning flag hoisted itself up the flagpole. “How do you know?”

“Because he was at your apartment this morning after you left, and he says he couldn’t find the wallet.”

“He went into my apartment? My apartment? Without asking my permission?”

“I told him to.” Min had his head down so he didn’t have to look at me.

“Well, that’s that, then.” I was determined to keep an atom of nonchalance in my voice, and nearly did. “If you don’t need me, I’ll be going.”

When Min picked up his head, he had a doleful look on his face. Having the apartment of one of our own staff searched was wildly beyond anything we’d ever done in our office. No chief inspector could expect to pull something like this and hope to keep his people with him. All I could figure was that Min was under so much pressure on this case it had undermined his judgment.

“Now, Inspector, this minute. I want that wallet, and I want it to be full of nice, crisp euro notes, all in order.” He was trying to sound resolute, but I could tell he felt bad.

“I thought Yang brought it back.”

“I told you, he said he couldn’t find it.” Min thought a moment. “Would you describe Yang as one of your perfect people?”

“Go to hell. You can go straight to hell.” My voice was unnaturally strained, it had taken on the timbre of a fighter plane off in the distance, lining up to strafe a truck convoy at dawn. I shook off the image. My parents had been killed in a strafing attack during the war, a lone jet in a barely light sky. I rarely thought about it, but when I was mad, it bobbed to the surface sometimes.

“Well, is he?” Min caught the ominous rumble and pushed back slightly from his desk.

“Yang is fine. Still a little shaken, but he’s coming out of it, slowly.
The man just needs some more time. It was a shock, losing his family like that.” Min had crossed another line, this one worse than the first. It was galling enough that he had ordered a search of my apartment, but I was even angrier at what he was insinuating about Yang. The only thing to do was to change the subject, or walk out. “So, you and Yang discussed the death of that fellow in the noodle shop?”

Min was glad to follow my lead. “Yes, we talked about that. And if it was only that, it would be dandy. But the guy that Little Li dragged over here last night was out again in an hour, and he was spitting mad about how he was treated.”

“He was treated fine. No one roughed him up. Neither Yang nor Li would do that. He had a nasty disposition, that’s all, and he was extra interested in the money. In case anyone has forgotten, he was sitting next to a man who fell off his chair into the great void under suspicious circumstances. We needed him to answer a few questions. Yang would have made a few mournful queries, Li would have taken a couple of hours typing up the report, the guy would have signed it, and he could have walked into the night.”

“Except for one thing. He’s somebody’s son.”

“Oh, excuse me. I’m somebody’s son.” I hesitated. Well, I was, even though I’d barely known my father. “You’re somebody’s son. We’re all somebody’s son, unless we’re somebody’s daughter.”

“Good, thank you, Inspector. Further lessons on lineage will be especially useful when we are on our way to a fucking coal mine in the fucking mountains.”

“It’s that bad?” Pressure apparently didn’t even begin to explain what Min was feeling.

“No, worse, much worse. He is not only someone’s son, he is someone’s husband . . . stop . . . don’t say anything, Inspector.” Min raised his voice and started speaking faster. “I don’t doubt that he is also someone’s cousin, and someone’s nephew, as well. Let me put it in words that will be plain, even to you. He is well connected. He moves in important circles.” He took a deep breath. “And he is now our enemy.”

“Why was he in that little noodle restaurant if he is such a big shot?” It was unsettling to see Min so rattled. We had lots of enemies. One more wouldn’t kill us—unless it was someone close to the center.

“I don’t care. I don’t care at all where he dines. He can come in here and dance on my desk if he wants to.”

“What about his dead friend?”

“Case closed. Episode never happened. Our prime witness is untouchable.”

“No, not yet, there is blood work and—”

“Closed. Locked. Sealed. I don’t care about his dead friend, not for one single, solitary second. Got it? The pathologist called to say the chances of getting anything back from the lab this century are zero; she said she’s sure it was his heart, and if she’s sure, that’s good enough for me. Now, bring me that wallet, and there better not be one bill missing.”

“The dead man, the owner of the wallet, had a business card from Club Blue in his jacket.”

“Anything else?”

“Some gum.”

Min threw up his hands.

“And”—I didn’t think this would weigh very heavily with Min, but I might as well throw it on the scale—“I saw the manager of that same club coming out of the Gold Star Bank last night.”

“So what? He was probably putting his money in the bank. That’s what people do these days, don’t ask me why. I wouldn’t trust a bank with my money. And our dead friend might have liked drinking clubs. It means nothing to me. All I care about at this moment is that wallet, not gum, not business cards—the wallet.”

“It wasn’t his wallet, I told you. We didn’t touch his wallet.”

“He says it is his. He says you stole it.”

“A lie.”

“A well-connected lie, Inspector.” He stopped for a moment and seemed to regain some composure. “Alright, of course I know you didn’t steal the wallet, but how are we going to explain it when we
send in a report that claims your apartment now doubles as our evidence custody room?”

“Where do you suppose he got all those big euro bills?”

“Not from the bank robbery.”

“How do you know?” Min was developing a bad habit of telling me things I did not know.

“Listen, the robbers got away with three bags of small bills, nothing bigger than a fifty. From what Yang says, the wallet had mostly one-, two-, and five-hundred-euro bills.”

Fine. Good. You have so many facts, why don’t you take over the investigation? Here.” I pulled the few notes I had on the case out of my pocket. “You can have these. Best of luck.”

“Inspector.” Min’s voice dropped to a soothing register. “It’s your case, you have the lead. Keep your notes. You do as you see fit. I’m just telling you a few tidbits that I happen to know.” He folded his hands on the desk and leaned toward me. “Look, it is painfully obvious every day that I’m not as good a chief inspector as Pak was, but what can I do?”

This came out of nowhere, though I knew it wasn’t nowhere or he never would have said it. It must have been eating at him for a long time. I’d have to do something, suggest we sit and talk to clear the air. It was past time for that, anyway. But not now. Right now we had a big problem—an accusation that we had stolen some money. It had to be fixed in a hurry. “Anything else you happen to know?”

“Not at the moment. If anything pops up, we’ll chat.”

It was irritating, that phrase. “Thank you. I’m interested in things that pop up, always have been. Sometimes I say to myself, ‘O, try to pay more attention to things that pop up, can’t you?’ ”

Min frowned before looking down at his desk. He moved a file folder from right to left, straightened it, then moved it back where it had been. “Don’t let’s be at each other’s throats, Inspector. It won’t do either of us any good.”